All the Broken Places: A Novel by John Boyne Review: A Haunting Sequel Built on Guilt and Complicity

A novel that uses the machinery of sequel and suspense to stage one of literature's most uncomfortable moral questions — not whether evil was done, but how much a child who witnesses it, and then spends a lifetime in silence, bears responsibility for it.

All the Broken Places is a historical fiction novel structured in three parts, two interludes, and an epilogue. Each section is anchored to a specific time period and location, alternating between Gretel Fernsby's present life as a 91-year-old woman in London and the years spanning her adolescence and young adulthood in postwar Europe. The London storyline centers on the arrival of a new family in the apartment below Gretel's — a situation that sets in motion a moral crisis mirroring one she failed decades earlier. The historical sections trace how Gretel and her mother Elsa fled Germany after her father Ralf's execution, assumed false identities in Paris, and eventually came apart under the weight of what they carried: Gretel believing they shared responsibility for the Holocaust, Elsa sliding toward bitterness and, ultimately, renewed pro-Nazi sentiment. Boyne has stated that he began making notes for this book immediately after finishing The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, and that its major themes are guilt, complicity, and the cycles of grief arising from world-shaking events.

As a direct sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, All the Broken Places inherits a large and emotionally invested readership — but it is not a children's book or a simple continuation. Where the original was narrated through the innocent eyes of Bruno, this novel gives full, adult interiority to Gretel, transforming her from a peripheral figure into a narrator whose perspective is both compromised and searching. The sequel takes up the character Boyne has described as examining how culpable a young person can be, given the circumstances of their upbringing. That question — moral accountability under conditions of childhood and ignorance — places the novel squarely within the tradition of serious literary fiction grappling with the long aftermath of the Holocaust. It was originally published on 15 September 2022, first by Doubleday, and is available in a Penguin Books paperback edition dated November 28, 2023.

Kirkus Reviews credits Boyne with handling the alternating narratives skillfully, using the dual timelines to build and sustain suspense. The same review describes Gretel's guilt as "a complex amalgam of feelings" — encompassing her father's role in running Auschwitz, her own gradual understanding of what that meant, her postwar silence, and her belief that she bears partial responsibility for Bruno's death. This layering is the novel's core achievement: rather than offering Gretel as purely a victim of circumstance or as a straightforwardly guilty party, Boyne holds the question open. The Guardian describes the novel as "consummately constructed, humming with tension until past and present collide," and notes that the boy Henry functions as a ghost-like figure recalling both Bruno and Gretel's failures. John Irving, whose endorsement appears on the Penguin Random House edition, calls it "a stunning tour de force." The publisher's description frames the book's central offer plainly: Gretel, faced now with the chance to save a young boy, can make a different choice than the one she made before — whatever the cost to herself.

Kirkus Reviews — one of the most rigorous of the named authoritative sources available — is candid about the novel's structural weaknesses. While the alternating timelines generate tension, Kirkus finds that they also "contribute to some avoidable repetitiousness in the writing and an occasional sense of aimlessness in the plot," a contrast with what the same review calls the "taut, effective economy" of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. The ending, in particular, draws pointed attention: Kirkus warns that what reads as an act of redemption "also smacks of self-justification that, in this fraught context, evokes grim historical antecedents," predicting that it will "spark fierce debate." These are not minor quibbles — they go to the structural and ethical coherence of the book's resolution, and readers who come to All the Broken Places expecting the compressed, parable-like clarity of its predecessor may find this novel more sprawling and more morally unresolved than anticipated.

All the Broken Places rewards readers who are willing to sit with moral ambiguity and who have an interest in literary fiction that treats the Holocaust and its aftermath with seriousness rather than sentimentality. Readers already connected to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas will find the expansion of Gretel's story substantive and, at times, genuinely unsettling in its implications. Those who prefer clean narrative arcs or definitive moral verdicts may find the novel's open questions frustrating rather than enriching — and Kirkus's caution about the ending is worth taking seriously before going in. For readers drawn to historical fiction that interrogates complicity, inherited guilt, and the possibility of late-life moral reckoning, this novel delivers those themes in a structurally ambitious, if occasionally uneven, form.